revenant scroll

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The Revenant Scroll is a sequence of stills taken from a road movie I made with a Paillard Bolex Regular-8 handheld camera while crossing the country from NYC to SF and back. I titled it Revenant.

The movie is a double exposure. I shot one roll of film per day for five days without looking though the viewfinder on stochastic impulse, while simultaneously keeping one hand on the wheel as I crossed thr country East to West. Then I reshot each role in reverse sequence while crossing back. 

The sequence of the film follows the rolling road with each frame containing a distance of 3000 miles (roughly the width of our country if you drive straight across it). Imagine opposite ends anywhere on a rotary track. In other words, each frame contains the entire breath of our country collapsed into one moment. It’s through this entrelineas that the land began to speak me, like a revenant. 

The conceptual construct of the scroll combines the connotation of a spiritual script, the formal references of an exquisite corpse, (there’s a thread of stratum that traverses the scroll), the Beat undertone of Keroac’s On the Road, (the images are stream of conscious, rough, and unmediated), and the role of the road embodied by the role of film.